... To ask what actually is an affordable housing?

[OftenHangry]

It looks like everyone has a completely different price bracket in mind when it comes to properties for sale. Obviously it's affected by where people live. I know you really can't buy 3 bed semi for 60k in London. Maybe a picture of it...

What is your idea of affordable housing?
Me:
Nort West - under 100k

because with 5% deposit it would cost about 8k to get into the property.
But I keep seeing these new builds labeled as affordable yet they cost double that!

Plenty of 3 bed with garden houses around me for much, much less (60k-70k), but staying on the market, because they need bit of work, I guess?

I am busy today, so if I don't answer, I haven't run. I will come back

YANBU OP, it's disgusting.
We are in the north and recently got burnt trying to buy a new build labelled as 'affordable'. It was shared ownership, but the sales people lied to us about the costs - telling us we would need a 5% deposit and the mortgage would be around £400 a month and the remaining rent less than £200 a month.
After we'd paid the reservation deposit, we were told it was actually a 20% deposit, and there was a load of extra hidden charges such as an extortionate management fee which came in it at nearly £100 a month, and the rent was more like £400 not £200. It was going to be over £1000 a month total - we were paying £600 a month to rent a 2 bed flat.

We are now buying a 'normal' non-new build instead (it's only 2 bed but is bigger than the 3 bed shoebox we were buying previously!) and have got a 95% mortgage, and no extra charges to pay.

...and £250-£350 would get you a 2-3 bedroom flat or possibly a smallish house

I always think of it in terms of a few-years-qualified teacher's or nurse's salary. Makes me rage when I see "Help to buy" type places for ££££, or shared ownership where the total value has visibly been inflated so that the share is overpriced.

Dorset here too, Id say its 300ish too. Definitely not affordable for us either. Thought we were pretty well off until we tried to get a mortgage.

a lot of people agree that we need a lot more houses built , the problem is that they dont want them near them
until we start building a lot more homes the supply and demand will keep huse prices up and therfore not affordable

The help to buy/ part but part rent flats are ridiculous. I’m in SE London & some of these have just been built close by. A 1 bed flat is £520k it is in a busy road junction, in a horrible area about 10 foot from a railway line. There is no way these properties are valued correctly as you could by an ex council house up the road for less money

Re help to buy. You can get 5% deposit mortgage on old properties too. But it comes with higher interest until you get more equity. I think that's the difference between that and help to buy?

Live in a 2 bed HA flat. Market price would be c.£500k. The council house I grew up in, London,now £1m. Even 'affordable' housing in either of these areas would be beyond the reach of those who most need them. I don't know how people manage and am glad I'm not young and just starting out laden down with debt and paying a landlord's mortgage. Little political will for change, awful.

Like a PP said, affordable is 3 x joint income

I don’t understand why people slag off new builds really. We desperately need more houses, and how else do you get them
Expect new builds?

Yes affordable is tricky. I bought alone on a salary of £50k in the south east ( purchase price £275k) so you don’t need hugely Hugh wages (that’s obv around £30-35k per person in a couple buying)
But I also don’t think affordable means affordable for all. The lowest paid people have never been able to purchase property. As unfair as it is, it’s the way it goes

We are slagging the fact that new builds are marked as affordable yeat they are more expensive than older housing.

I live in the north west, a Box 3 bed new build here is around £160,000, rip of

I'm disappointed that this thread turned out to not really be about "affordable housing" in the political sense of the term. I have a related rant that I want to let out. Short version: there is not and cannot be such a thing as "affordable housing", it's a euphemism for "subsidised housing." (I don't necessarily have a problem with subsidy, it's dishonest language that enrages me.)

Well overpriced shoe boxes is pretty slagging of fun

Slagging off even

I cannot understand why new builds are so expensive. We live in Southampton and one of my neighbours has just sold her house (2 bed Victorian terrace) for £175k.
Just down the road is a new estate where a 2 bed terraced house is up for over £300k. Actually smaller square footage than the old houses yet nearly double the price!

I am going to sound pro green belt and I have to state I am really really not, but the reason brownfield is often left is the land is contaminated and the cost of treating it will eat up the profits on the subsequent house
sales

House building isn’t actually hugely profitable (a good return is about 30%, more in expensive areas less in cheaper ones) so unless the builder can make a decent profit they won’t do it. You can’t make a profit driven company sell at £180k when they know they can get £300k.

I live in NI and I think there are plenty of housing options depending on your budget. You can buy a house in a council estate with 3 or 4 big bedrooms and generous kitchen and livingroom for about 60-100k depending on location. You could also buy a small, old terraced house for similar money that is not ex-council or in an estate.

In the nearest city to us 3 bed semi-detached new builds start from around £125k in several edge of city housing developments. The gardens and all of the rooms are very small but they would be insulated well and habe a 10 year warranty and can be generally bought with a single F/T income and the help of co-ownership, or bought without co-ownership and two F/T bellow average salaries.

We do have some naice areas in NI where housing is much more expensive (Hillsborough and North Down generally). In these areas you could be looking at £325k for a newbuild (but mock old-style and characterful) 2/3 bed "townhouse".

Over all I do think housing is still cheaper than a lot of the UK, £500k here bought us our dream house, it wouldn't get you a lot of space in London.

In my experience, friends and family who complain about not being able to afford to get on the property ladder generally mean that they can't afford their ideal home in their ideal area. There is lots of variously priced options available that aren't a health hazard or falling apart.

I don't think that people are objecting to new houses being built near them. They are more likely objecting to a 5000 house estate on a floodplain with 15 "affordable" homes. The houses being built are very ugly, cheap with tiny rooms, no storage or useable outdoor space, but that's ok because every room has an on suite. They also aren't going to improve the local infrastructure, so there won't be more roads out of the town, more buses/trains, new schools or doctors surgerys because they got round that clause by paying the council to do that for them and so the money will go on other underfunded Essential services.

There is nothing affordable near me at all & I hate it. I live in a major city and yet there are many pockets of brownfield land that have been undeveloped in the 20+ years I've lived here. I don't know why they aren't forced into building on them. There is the space available, someone somewhere just isn't letting it happen.

It's a question of maths really. Average wage 22k, x two. 44 k per annum, max x 4 ( depending on other outgoings like child care), = 176 k. Then add in deposit, of say 10 percent. As such, outwith London it would be in the range of 195 k max.

In London it would be higher. Average wage 28 k. So approx max 250 or so.

For single folks it's obviously much less as it's say three times single salary.

You need to go back to the 1990's to find truly affordable housing for ftb's around here.
The only ones just about the right price £100+ are one beds in a town 6 miles away.
DD will have to save up for years to live in our area even with a deposit gift from relatives. She's only 18 and has a decent job with opportunities to live abroad/UK cities so may want to sample some of them before deciding where she wants to be anyway.
Personally we chose this area because it is really nice therefore relatively expensive for the East Midlands.

No more than 4 x the average salary.

@Kpo58 I agree. My town desperately needs affordable houses in the under-100k bracket. Lots of people including myself have objected to proposals to build 1500 houses. Developers are only required to make about 10% of the houses affordable, and their idea of affordable is £200k. So out of 1500 houses there’d be 150 “affordable” houses, 1350 big executive detached houses that local people can’t afford, zero additional doctor/school places, and zero fucks given about the new estate causing flooding further down the hill because water management systems aren’t adequate regardless of what the developers say.